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Dancing Ferret is having a big 20th Anniversary show at The Trocadero, and I was tapped to do the artwork for the event. It was flattering to get to do the piece, and I had a good time doing it. It was a pretty interesting request: Draw a ferret looking rather dapper with two hot goth girls with him. Sounds good to me!

The piece you see is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever created. In 2012, I heard Lamb of God, easily one of my favorite bands of all time, was coming to Philadelphia and were going to have a Meet-and-Greet before the show. I decided that since I couldn’t make it to the show I would at least get Lamb of God to sign something for me, so after some thought, I decided to just go ahead and do a gig poster JUST for them. Literally! I only made 3 copies: Two for me and one for them. The plan was to get two small ones, give them one, and one large version to get signed that I could put up on my wall.

When I arrived at the FYE at Broad and Chestnut, I had run over from work which was just down the street, just 7 blocks away, and I was near the end of the line. I spoke to other awesome fans, met an awesome rep from Sony who took my photo with the poster, and I was getting really excited! Finally, the moment arrived and I got to meet the band, and, despite how many times I’ve met or worked with famous people or someone I admire, I still was starstruck! I wound up barely talking and just having a giant grin on my face! The band was incredibly nice, and they signed the new album, “Resolution”, for me along with the posters. They were all really thrilled with it and like it!

That’s when I got to Randy Blythe, the front man for Lamb of God. He always stood tall to me… partly because he’s a good foot taller than me, but also because he has one hell of a voice! His personality shone through, and he loved the poster! He wound up taking a photo of it and putting it on his Twitter feed! Randy then turned to me and asked, “Hey, are you going to the show tonight?” “No, I can’t, I don’t have a ticket, but I really hope you have a great show tonight!” That’s when he turned to someone and handed me a piece of cloth. “Enjoy the show tonight, man, you earned it!” It was a pass to the show! I could hardly believe it!

I wound up walking down the stairs from the meet-and-greet and out the door with a giant grin on my face! I couldn’t believe it! Not only did I get to meet one of my favorite bands, not only did they like my work, but I just got a free ticket to the show right from them! It was surreal, and like I could hear people calling my name. And they were. “LARRY!” I turned around, all the guys in Lamb of God were yelling my name… because I left my CD up there.

I mentioned at least once how awesome it would be to actually get to do some design work for them, and who knows, maybe it’ll come true soon.

I wanted to do something COMPLETELY different as a gig poster than I had ever done before, and since Mayhem has always had an aura of terror and mysticism about them (anyone who knows Norwegian black metal will tell you that!), and I wanted to capture the feeling I got from them when I listen to “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, specifically the title track.

The idea of the monster was that it was this… thing. I didn’t want it to be anything, actually, just this weird otherworldly creature. Its a mix of Chtulu and the monster from Watchmen, with a bit of my own weirdness mixed in.

One thing I loved about doing this piece was the fact that it reminded me of how I worked back in High School; sitting at my desk at night drawing the most Satanic and terrifying things I could imagine!

I did do the type separately in this case, and I drew it by hand and scanned it back in. Getting the tentacles to wrap was something I wanted, but I also wanted everything behind it, too.

Other than the way the entire typography was handled on this poster, the other big change is the way I showed the main band name; I decided to let it bleed off the page. I knew it was easy enough to read that passing by you would go, “Oh fuck, MAYHEM is in town? I need to go! NOW!”

This should be one hell of a show! Holy Grail will be playing the balcony at The Troc, and admission is only $10! So unless you’re a starving artist, I think you should be able to make it, have a damn good time, and enjoy some awesome power/thrash metal!

I sketched out the poster idea about a week before I decided to work on a finish. It wasn’t a very developed concept; a woman with snakes. I always like trying to add more and more to a piece like that, and I decided to do an ode to Leviathan.

At the same time, I was looking more and more at the work of my contemporaries, especially Godmachine. His work is consistently amazing, and I wanted to try something in the style he did that seems to be, in fact, the modern illustration style (my opinion, and nothing more). That said, my apologies if its too close!

I’m pretty happy with the result. I worked on it originally as a t-shirt design that I was going to turn into a poster, but I kept running into the same problem; I didn’t like how colorful it was, especially on the poster. The original has a LOT of green, and on a whim I decided to make everything red. It worked great for the poster, and so you have this.

A lot of blood, sweat, and annoyance went into this piece. The woman’s head was a nightmare to draw, and it’s my biggest weakness. I love drawing women’s heads, but I suck at drawing them looking up. I think I got it this time. 🙂

This is what happens when you go to Catholic School for 13 years, folks!

I love drawing nuns, relying on symbolism, and just being blatant at times. In this case, that’s exactly what I wanted in every possible way.

I heard Deicide was coming to town and wanted to show my support by doing a gig poster for their upcoming show. I had a vision of just some praying nun with horns coming out of her head, and a Rosary in her hands.

To be honest, this piece is as deep as it appears, and then some. As much as it may be about some nun turning to Satan, it really isn’t. In essence, I wanted to convey that the same love and devotion that can be shown to God can be shown to Satan. Is it really all that bad? Isn’t faith and love in something and someone more important than who, ESPECIALLY if they’re wind up otherwise being a good person for it?

So for this poster, I did something I normally never, EVER do; I did my own hand-drawn typography and did it as a vector! It was the most draftsman-like thing I’ve done as an artist in about 3 years because of how technical it was. I used Adobe Illustrator and for the first time turned on Smart Guides. I wished I had done it sooner! It made the curves much smoother and I love how the “e’s” came out. The typography was inspired by some classic Gothic Black-lettering, but also a bit of Art-Nouveau.

This piece is actually less about Kreator and more about the subject matter. It’s weird; it basically drew itself, but the design took a while to do. But it’s also based largely on the album cover for “Enemy of God Revisited”

On the surface, this is just a semi-generic piece, with a skull, inverted cross, and some hint of nudity. Below is some actual meaning and purpose. Is the piece a statement of the futility of religion in and of itself? Am I saying that going down the path of “evil” will lead to your demise?

The odd thing is I don’t honestly know.

There’s a meaning to this piece, a sense of purpose here, that even I can’t honestly explain. In the end, it could be nothing more than me taking a bit of a poke at Catholicism without really thinking about it. Why?

The inverted cross, while modernly referenced to Satanism, is actually a symbol of cleansing and purification. In fact, Peter, one of the 12 apostles, asked to be hung upside-down as he didn’t find himself worthy of being killed the same way as Jesus. As you may know, Peter was “the rock” upon which the Catholic Church is built.

At the same time, upon this head, we see a skull attached to a woman’s body. In reference to that last point, am I saying that this is, in fact, a dead church? And since there is a woman’s body, that said dead church gives life at the cost of death?

Maybe. Now that I think of it, it could be…. or maybe I did just want to draw something that looked awesome.

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KREATOR will be playing The Trocadero March 4th, 2010 at 7PM! They’ll be playing with Voivod, Nachtmystium, Evile, and Lazarus A.D.

So, this one needs little help from me, but I’m still pleased to do so with a double-shot of posters!

BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME will be playing in Philadelphia at The Troc on January 31st at 6PM. Not only that, but Canadian Music-Master DEVIN TOWNSEND will be opening the whole affair!

YOU CAN GET TICKETS HERE!!!!!Now, personally, I’m not a big fan of the headliner, Between the Buried and Me. For me, this show is all about Devin Townsend. He is, without a doubt, one of my favorite musicians. He’s start came via playing on Steve Vai’s “Sex and Religion” album, after which he went on to start his own label and release albums from more styles than you could imagine! From alt-rock to ambient to the heaviest fucking metal ever, and all the way to punk and even progressive rock and metal, Devin’s talent lies in being able to mix and match styles and, through it all, perfect them all.

This is another poster I did for fun: Again, not commissioned by the band or the venue, but me trying my damnedest to help both.

I was on the train home this time around when I started sketching out the layout of this piece. I threw on “Come Clarity” and just started to draw what came to mind. A big-horned Demoness with flames coming out her eyes…. man, I wonder what THAT means? Seriously, I wonder what my subconscious was trying to scream out at me about.

I’ll post the sketch soon, but I was really happy with the way the sketch came out. On top of that, I had already done a quick sketch for the Obituary poster that I’ve already posted, so when I got home I went straight to my art studio and cranked out the pencils in about 30 minutes. No, I’m not kidding. 30 minutes. The Xecutioner took about an hour or more because the pose was hard to get, along with the proportions… but that’s another story.

The next day I went back to working, this time inking everything. I had wrapped up inking on the Xecutioner, and I was a little worried about this one (again, another story), but there was a really nice, easy flow to this one. The fact that this one wasn’t even close to being as urgent helped. The inks on this were about an hour or more, and it involved doing the logo on a separate piece of paper. If you look at the pencils, even my scanned-in inks, you can see I had plotted out the logo. I took a piece of copy paper and a light table and inked the lettering onto the paper.

Scanning in everything was easy, and coloring it was fun. I made it as simple as possible and decided to stay as true as how I would do it by hand as possible. I’m contemplating doing a “painted” version one day, but for now, I’m thrilled with this.

Behind the screaming demoness is a symbol. Now, those familiar with In Flames will see something familiar yet strange. In Flames has adopted a few symbols over the years, and there was a sort of tribal one used back in 2006 for Come Clarity. I decided to take the idea and make it my own. In this case, it involved turning it into the symbol of chaos as well.

There’s some writing on the original piece, but I had to take it off the smaller versions of the posters because it didn’t read well. I was listening to “A Sense of Purpose” while penciling it in and one lyric in particular came to mind: ” Feel this up your conviction!” To me, though, it sounded like “Feel the Realness of Your Convictions!”, thus the name of the piece. The lyric is from the song “I’m the Highway”.

But while I was listening to the album, another lyric came screaming out to me: ” Thought I was unbreakable, but this is killing me!” This lyric is from “Delight and Angers”, and it just felt perfect. Now, as soon as I wrote it, I was worried about the way people would interpret that. I didn’t want it to look as if I was saying, “Oh no, Satan is evil and will betray you!”, but its more along the lines of two old sayings: “Pride comes before the fall” and “Be careful what you wish for.”

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IN FLAMES is playing The Trocadero October 4th at 7PM. They will be joined by Between the Buried and Me, 3 Inches of Blood, and The Faceless.

“Stop Bitching and Start a Revolution”. To me, these are words to live by.

I love metal shows, and I love concert posters. So its always a shock and annoyance to me to never see posters or flyers for metal concerts coming up in Philadelphia. The local blogs seem to tend to ignore them, instead opting to post (as I’ve ranted a million times before) about some indie rock or trance/electronica band.

On Monday, September 28th, Obituary, Goatwhore, Krisiun, and Warbringer will play The Trocadero at 6PM! Tickets are only $17.50, $20 at the door, and it should be a good show!

I’m really am happy about this piece. I did it over the week, and I’ll post the full-color version soon. This wasn’t commissioned by the band, venue, or anyone: This was 100% ME. I got the idea back in August to do this. Obituary was originally called Xecutioner, and I liked the idea of having a female executioner posing with an Axe. The idea went from her having a sort of metal-chick head to… well… this. The idea quickly became more about making a woman with a hot body, but looked like she would destroy you. Basically, tempting you to get close, but watch out!

The X on her shoulder was also based on the bands old name. I’m a big Pushead fan and I wanted to use a similar font style on something, so I picked this.